How free is your free will?

TOPICS: You have two levels of awareness, the totality of the Conscious You and the awareness of your soul vehicle - the Conscious You makes choices, but when in embodiment, it sees its options through the filter of the soul vehicle - you can always uncover and fulfill your divine plan - you must deal with the dweller on the threshold of your past momentums - your free will is always free, but limited by your awareness -

Question: Is the free will of my immediate consciousness separate from my soul, like my soul's is distinct from our I AM? For instance, in many, many moments I have been so hopeless, and in some I have voted to not be. In others I have felt so sincere and convinced and eager about our spiritual destiny. Is my soul making more sense out of this than linear me is, or are its hands tied similar to the way my I AM's are tied by the free will of my soul?

Answer from ascended master Jesus through Kim Michaels:

If you study some of the many books on near-death experiences or people who have been regressed and have remembered how their lifestreams planned their current embodiments, you will see that the totality of the lifestream is far more than the conscious awareness of most people. In other words, before you come into embodiment, you can look at the big picture of the evolution of your lifestream, and you can do so in a detached manner. Therefore you can make a very rational and detailed plan for what you want to accomplish in your next embodiment.

When the lifestream enters a physical body, it usually loses the memory of the big picture, meaning its total awareness. Some people can remember having certain experiences or memories as young children, but they are often forgotten later, as the lifestream becomes involved with daily living in the material universe. Only lifestreams who have attained a high degree of spiritual maturity in past lifetimes will retain a high degree of awareness and memory. Yet most spiritual seekers will have a strong intuitive sense of where they want to go in life.

So one can say that when your lifestream enters the physical body, its sense of awareness and identity becomes far more limited than before the lifestream entered the body. So what determines the awareness you have with your conscious mind?

As we explain, the core of your being is the Conscious You. The Conscious You starts out with a point-like sense of self, and as it gains experiences in the material universe, it will expand its sense of self, it will expand the sphere of its total awareness. This expansion has a vertical and a horizontal aspect. The vertical is that you expand your sense of being connected to the I AM Presence, moving towards total oneness with your Presence (personal Christhood). The horizontal is that you expand your knowledge of the material world and how it functions.

So the awareness you have before you descend into embodiment is determined by how much the Conscious You has expanded its sphere of self. The wider your sphere – the more awareness you have – the more options you can see. In other words, the Conscious You is the center of your free will. The Conscious You has complete free will, yet it can choose only among the options it can see or imagine. And the options you can see depend on how wide is the sphere of your awareness. In other words, while you are making your divine plan for your next embodiment, you have access to the total awareness you have attained through all of your embodiments.

So then what happens when you actually take embodiment? As I explain elsewhere, LINK what most people call the soul is actually a 4-fold vehicle that the Conscious You creates in order to express itself in the four levels of the material universe. This 4-fold vehicle is created over many lifetimes, and as I explain, most people on earth have descended into the duality consciousness. This means that your soul vehicle is made up of many illusions from the duality consciousness and it also stores many misqualified energies. All of these will limit the awareness of your soul vehicle.

When you are in between embodiments, you can – if you have some spiritual maturity – look at your situation with the full awareness of the Conscious You. Yet when you descend into embodiment, you will begin to look at life through the soul vehicle, which means your awareness of life will now be limited to what you can see through the filter of the 4-fold vehicle. You can compare this to standing on a ship with full freedom to look around and then putting on a deep-sea diving suit, that has only a small window through which you can look out. Your soul vehicle is comparable to the diving suit, and the level of consciousness of the soul determines the size and clarity of the window through which you look at the world when you are in embodiment.

So you now see that you have two considerations. First, is the level of awareness that the Conscious You has built over many lifetimes. This is what you use to plan your next embodiment. Yet when you descend into a body, you usually lose this awareness. Many young children still have some awareness from being between embodiments, but it is usually forgotten as the child grows. And what then happens is that your awareness is now limited to what you can see through the filter of the 4-fold vehicle.

Again, the Conscious You is the seat of your free will, and technically your will is always completely free. Yet in actuality, the Conscious You can only choose among the options it can see, and that is why you feel limited by your soul vehicle. Many spiritual people sense there is more to them than the soul, and they feel they should be able to make better choices, yet they can’t consciously envision or accept their options, so they remain stuck and this can give rise to a sense of hopelessness.

Yet the beauty of the teachings about the Conscious You is that the Conscious You is NOT the soul vehicle. The Conscious You is pure awareness, which means that it has the ability to project itself anywhere it desires. No matter what is your level of soul awareness, the Conscious You always has the option to deliberately stop identifying itself fully with the 4-fold vehicle. It will then be possible for you to experience yourself as pure awareness, meaning that you are conscious, but you are not experiencing the world through the filter of the soul vehicle. You now experience that you are more than the soul.

Once you begin to have this frame of reference, you will stop identifying yourself with the 4-fold vehicle, and this will make it much easier for you to dismiss the many illusions of the soul consciousness. As you also clear out the energies in the soul vehicle, you will clarify and expand your perspective, and this means you will gradually begin to see the divine plan that the Conscious You made before coming into embodiment. In other words, no matter how low of a soul awareness you have created in past lives, you will always have the option to rise to the total awareness that the Conscious You has attained. Which means you will always be able to uncover and fulfill your divine plan—if you apply the spiritual teachings and tools we have given.

My point is that when you distinguish between the Conscious You and the 4-fold vehicle, you see that it is the Conscious You which makes choices. What most people call the soul is not actually the seat of your free will (unless you define soul as including the Conscious You), and the function of the soul is to limit the options that the Conscious You can see or imagine while in embodiment.

Consider that you are walking inside a dark building with a small flashlight and you come upon two doors. You would obviously think that you have to go through one of the two doors. Yet what if there was a third and fourth door that you cannot currently see. Only if you expanded the flashlight, would you be able to see the other doors.

So when you discover the spiritual path, your first task is to realign your outer personality and your conscious free will with the broader awareness and deeper choices of the Conscious You. Once you have brought your outer awareness and personality into alignment with the true individuality of the Conscious You, you can then begin to build from there to fulfill your divine plan and express your God-given creativity. We might also say that your foremost task is for the Conscious You to become conscious of who it really is, instead of thinking it is limited to the 4-fold vehicle.

You mention a sense of hopelessness and that you have many times chosen non-being. This is something many spiritual seekers encounter, as it is indeed an inevitable part of the spiritual path. Let me explain why.

During past lifetimes, most people have built certain momentums on making specific choices. If you choose to react to certain situations in a specific way, and if you reinforce that choice over many lifetimes, you will build a reactionary pattern. As Gautama Buddha explains in a pivotal discourse, LINK anything you focus your attention upon will be imbued with a certain form of consciousness, which can lead to the creation of a “beast.” This has in some esoteric teachings been called the “dweller on the threshold.” The reason for this name is that the beast dwells on the threshold to a new level of awareness. So in order to rise above your present level of awareness, you will have to encounter and overcome the dweller of your past momentums, the momentums that keep you tied to your present level of awareness.

If you compare this to the timeless question of Hamlet: “To be or not to be,” we can say that you have in past lives built a certain momentum of choosing not to be. And in order to rise to a new level, you must overcome those momentums. Now, most non-spiritual people can live an entire lifetime without ever encountering these past momentums, this dweller. Yet for a spiritual person who is willing to grow, it is inevitable that you must encounter one or more of your dwellers. And as you do so, you will for a time feel the weight of the momentum of non-being that the dweller is made from.

What this momentum – which is made from both the dualistic beliefs of your ego and the momentum of lower energies – will do is to give you a sense that you simply can’t live without it and that you – meaning your self-awareness – will die if you “slay the dragon of the dweller.” The key to overcoming this sense of hopelessness is to experience pure awareness. Thereby, you will realize that it is quite true what your ego is telling you. The self-awareness that was defined by the ego and the dweller will indeed die. Yet this does not mean that YOU will die, because you are not the 4-fold vehicle, you are the Conscious You, which is pure awareness and thus cannot die when the dweller dies.

This is the only real way to separate yourself from the dweller and surrender it, whereby it will either die of starvation or can be bound and dissolved by Archangel Michael. And once a certain dweller is slain, you will feel a new sense of freedom, which will last until you are ready to ascend to the next level up and thus must encounter the next dweller. Yet once you become conscious of the process, it becomes so much easier to avoid identifying with the dweller. You simply see it for what it is and then surrender it unconditionally.

My point again is that the ego and the dweller will have the effect of limiting either the options you can see or your ability/willingness to choose a higher option than you have done in the past. And thus we can say that until you overcome your past momentums, you are not truly free to choose. My point being that although I keep saying you have free will, it is a valid consideration how free your will actually is. And obviously, your freedom of will depends on your field of vision, your awareness, your sense of self.